Impacts of Intrinsic Noise and Quantum Entanglement on the Geometric and Dynamical Properties of the XXZ Heisenberg Interacting Spin Model
M. Yachi, B. Amghar, J. Elfakir, M. El Falaki, S. A. Chelloug, A. A Abd El-Latif, A. Slaoui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17452
Understanding Prompt Programming Tasks and Questions
Jenny T. Liang, Chenyang Yang, Agnia Sergeyuk, Travis D. Breaux, Brad A. Myers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17264
Russland: Ukrainische Drohne mit Ziel Moskau abgeschossen
Die russische Luftabwehr hat eine ukrainische Drohne mit dem Ziel Moskau abgeschossen, wie der Bürgermeister der Stadt, Sergej Sobjanin, mitteilte. "Die Luftabwehrkräfte des Verteidigungsministeriums haben eine Drohne abgeschossen, die Moskau angriff. Rettungskräfte arbeiten an der Absturzstelle", schrieb Sobjanin auf Telegram.
📑
Interesting and fulsome interview on exactly how NORAD reacted to the plane hijacking in Victoria/Vancouver on Tuesday. They speak to the commander of NORAD, currently a Canadian.
I appreciated the last section most though:
“It's the only bi-national command in the world; it's been a strong bi-national command since 1958, and nothing has changed.
We don't ever talk politics at work. It's not something that we do, nor does it affect what we do.
I would say that we are as tight, and probably tighter than we've ever been. As the world around us gets to be more dangerous, I would say that NORAD is even closer than it's ever been.
But one last thing — we have the watch. That's the slogan here for NORAD.
To give you a great example, all of the assessors, we all live on-base in homes that actually have a safe, we call it the SCIF. It's basically a classified room that has all of our systems. The days that you're on duty, you're either at work or in your house. Because the timelines are so small for answering the phone, you don't walk the dog; you don't do all these other things, and someone covers for you when you're going between work and home.
That's how important this mission is to us down here. It's really important for everybody in Canada to know that at NORAD, we have the watch”
#canpoli #norad #cf18
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/us-fighter-jets-bc-alleged-plane-hijacking-1.7588750
AbstentionBench: Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions
Polina Kirichenko, Mark Ibrahim, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Samuel J. Bell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09038
So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.
Læs og græd (eller gru): https://dm.dk/forskerforum/aktuelt/2025/juni/skandalebyggeri-koster-forskerfyringer-paa-ku/
Det er uforståeligt for mig hvorfor KŸbenhavns Universitet skal betale for ekstraudgifter til et byggeri vi ikke selv ha…
What Factors Affect LLMs and RLLMs in Financial Question Answering?
Peng Wang, Xuesi Hu, Jiageng Wu, Yuntao Zou, Qiancheng Zhang, Dagang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08339
Second-degree Price Discrimination: Theoretical Analysis, Experiment Design, and Empirical Estimation
Soheil Ghili, K. Sudhir, Nitish Jain, Ankur Garg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13426
In a few days I’ll have a CSV/json of exported Cryptpad answers for some kind of census. Are there any open source softwares out there that make analysing these kind of stuff easier?
Instead of just like opening it on a fucking libreoffice spreadsheet or something.
Ideally it’d give me like the amount of people who selected each option on a question, same for written ones (being able to set aliases like “abcd = ABCD” and “Guix = GNU Guix” bc people can’t be consistent when answering polls), with the ability to understand comma-separated replies to those questions as if they were multiple selections on a checkbox question).
Maybe being able to generate some graphs too, but at least giving me a list with like “question1, reply1, amount” for each so I can easily make graphs myself.